Teenage pregnancy

Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, The, Spring, 2000 by Alexander McKay

Dryburgh, H. (2000). Teenage pregnancy. Health Reports, 12, 9-18

This report from Statistics Canada updates teen pregnancy data up to and including 1997. The report begins by noting that during the last quarter century, there has been an overall decline in the Canadian teen pregnancy rate. To determine the number of teen pregnancies in a given year, Statistics Canada sums the number of live births, induced abortions, still births, and known miscarriages for women aged 15 to 19. The teen pregnancy rate is the number of pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19.

Statistics Canada began collecting teen pregnancy data in 1974 and in that year the rate was 53.7 per 1,000. By 1987, the teen pregnancy rate had declined to 41.1, the lowest rate for the period 1974 to 1997. By 1994, the rate had increased to 48.8. However, since then the rate declined to 47.1 in 1995, 45.2 in 1996, and 42.7 in 1997. In 1997, there were an estimated 42,162 teen pregnancies. In that year, the pregnancy rate among 15 to 17 year-olds was 25.5 and among 18 to 19 year-olds the rate was 68.9.

For live births, in 1974 the rate was 35.6 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19. The lowest rate again was in 1987 when the teen live birth rate was 22.9 but by 1991 the rate had risen to 25.7. Beginning in 1992 the live birth rate among teenagers began to decline steadily to a rate of 20.0 in 1997. In 1974, the teen abortion rate was 13.9 per 1,000 and during the 1990s, the rate increased slightly from 19.3 in 1990 to 21.5 in 1997. In sum, for the year 1997, about 19,724 women aged 15 to 19 gave birth and a slightly larger number (21,233) had an abortion.

With respect to regional differences, in 1997 the highest teen pregnancy rate in Canada was in the Northwest Territories (123.3), followed by the Yukon (65.8), Manitoba (63.2), Saskatchewan (54.2), Alberta (51.5), Ontario (42.4), British Columbia (42.1), Nova Scotia (38.9), Prince Edward Island (36.5), Quebec (36.1), New Brunswick (34.6), and Newfoundland (32.7).